When the butcher at the grocery gives the brittle,
symmetrical object to your young daughter,
you do not, at first, think it’s a mistake
as you ask him for another, hold both
thin ends between each of your index fingers, then slowly
pull, to show her how it works. Instead
you remember the first Thanksgiving 
without a father. A smaller turkey browning in a pan
through oven light, your mother’s blue dress, you
perched on the counter with your eyes shut, the wish
quietly forming on your tongue.
You look at your daughter, her brown eyes closed,
waiting for you to begin the count, and as the butcher
wraps the sliced meat in wax paper, you suddenly
realize it wasn’t your mother drawing
the thinner half that made it unfavorable.
It was how, when you opened up your eyes again
to the empty space at the kitchen table,
everything around you grew heavier, and now you want
to take back what you’ve done, for your small daughter
standing patiently in front of you to remain living
within the perfect, watery second before
she re-enters the world. Though this wish
is useless, too, because she has already seen 
the bruised, discolored edges, the dried blood
near the top, because she has held it in her hand
and touched it, and you have already
described to her, by example,
the way things will end.
Now you are certain, more than ever,
of what comes next: There is no
clean break for the human heart, not
with the way we must always lean
against one another, for definition, then, finally,
sweet mercy, and how the ending has nothing
to do with going back to being
half again, but rather, like the cracked wishbone
split jaggedly between you,
the end is everything about the particular lie
that makes us capable
of believing ourselves into evenness.